From endless choice to a confident decision

60,000 cards. One decision. Where do you start?

What working on card discovery at thortful taught me about customer confidence, choice and my role as a product designer.

There’s a particular feeling you get when you find the right greeting card. The joke sounds like something your friend would say. The illustration reminds you of your mum. The message captures something you wanted to express but couldn’t quite put into words.

That moment of recognition is part of what makes buying a card personal.

At thortful, a catalogue of more than 60,000 cards offered plenty of opportunities for that moment. The variety of independent designs meant customers could find something specific to the person they were buying for and the relationship they shared.

But it also created a challenge: how do you help someone find that card among thousands of possibilities?

For me, this became an interesting product discovery problem because it brought together two things that don’t always sit comfortably alongside each other: the value of a large catalogue and the effort involved in choosing from it.

When browsing starts to feel like work

Our discovery work highlighted choice paralysis, endless scrolling and the time customers spent trying to find something suitable.

The behavioural data gave us some useful starting points. More than half of customers viewed over 80 cards during their browsing journey. Among customers who converted, more than half reached at least 120 cards. Only around 20% used filters to narrow their options.

Those figures needed interpretation.

Viewing lots of cards could mean someone was enjoying the range. They might be laughing at different designs, discovering creators or browsing without any urgency. It could also mean they were struggling to find something they wanted to buy.

Even a completed purchase didn’t tell us whether choosing had felt easy or exhausting.

This is one of the things I find most interesting about discovery. A metric can show us a pattern, but understanding what that pattern means for the customer requires more investigation.

As a product designer, part of my role is to hold that distinction open. I need to understand what the evidence supports, where we’re making assumptions and which questions are worth exploring next.

In this case, the question was whether our catalogue helped customers feel spoilt for choice—or left them feeling overwhelmed by it.

Choosing a card is surprisingly difficult to describe

A birthday card for your best friend sounds like a straightforward shopping task. You know the occasion and the recipient. Surely that should be enough to narrow the options?

But those categories only describe part of the decision.

You might want something funny, but with a particular kind of humour. Affectionate, without being too sentimental. Something that references a shared interest or captures the way you speak to each other.

A customer can know all of this without knowing what to type into a search box.

Our search data raised further questions. Around 30% of sessions involved search, with an average of 2.5 searches, yet approximately 40% of search sessions didn’t lead to a product view.

That didn’t explain why those journeys stopped. It did give us a reason to investigate how well the experience connected a customer’s intention with relevant designs.

The challenge became clearer when I thought about the language involved. Our catalogue needs categories, labels and searchable information. Customers arrive thinking about people, relationships and feelings.

There’s a gap between those two ways of describing the same purchase. Helping bridge it is a design problem that reaches beyond the layout of a results page.

My role starts with the question we ask

With a problem like this, it’s easy to move straight into interface improvements. Make filters more prominent. Improve the search field. Add recommendations.

Each could be useful. But choosing a direction too early risks committing to an explanation we haven’t established.

Take the low use of filters. It could suggest that customers weren’t noticing them, didn’t understand the options or didn’t find them useful. It could also suggest that manually narrowing a catalogue wasn’t how they wanted to shop.

The figure alone couldn’t tell us which explanation was right.

For me, a valuable part of product design is turning that uncertainty into a better question. “How do we increase filter usage?” encourages us to optimise a feature. “How do we help customers find a relevant card with less effort?” gives us more room to consider what customers actually need.

That framing also changes the conversation around success. Filter usage might increase while choosing remains difficult. Equally, customers might find the right card more easily through a route that barely involves filters.

My contribution is partly in making those distinctions visible, then using them to shape the ideas we explore.

Making room for different shopping intentions

There was another tension to consider: customers weren’t all arriving with the same goal.

Some wanted inspiration. They were happy to browse and discover something unexpected. Others had a specific purchase in mind and wanted to complete it quickly.

The same person could behave differently depending on the occasion and how much time they had.

This became particularly relevant around peak occasions, when some customers arrived close to the event. For someone shopping under time pressure, a large range can become another thing to work through before they can finish the task.

That made me think carefully about what “better discovery” should mean. A shorter journey might help a customer in a hurry. Someone enjoying a browse might value the freedom to keep exploring.

The design challenge was to support those different intentions while keeping the variety that made the catalogue appealing.

Exploring a more guided experience

During a hackathon with the Brand team, we explored ways to make card discovery more guided, personal and playful.

One concept was Card Cupid. The idea was to ask a few questions about the recipient, their personality and the occasion, then use those answers to help narrow the selection.

The thinking behind it was that describing the person you’re buying for might be easier than describing the card you want.

That was a hypothesis to explore. A guided experience could reduce the effort of browsing, but it could also introduce friction if the questions felt lengthy or the resulting cards didn’t reflect the answers.

We also explored an occasion-focused experience for customers who wanted to find something quickly. This approached the problem through a more focused starting point, with fewer decisions between arriving and seeing relevant cards.

Working with Brand brought another dimension to the exploration. The guidance needed to feel appropriate for thortful: warm, playful and connected to the experience of choosing a card. The wording and tone were part of how the interaction would work.

My role in that collaboration was to keep the customer problem connected to the concepts. What effort were we removing? What new effort were we introducing? Why would this approach help someone make a choice?

Those questions helped give the ideas a purpose beyond being an interesting alternative to a product grid.

What I would want to learn next

These concepts were explorations, so I can’t claim they reduced browsing time or improved conversion.

The next step would be to understand whether customers found them useful in practice. Could they answer the questions easily? Did the selection feel relevant? Did they feel more confident choosing, or want to return to browsing?

I would also want to look at behaviour alongside what customers told us. Search-to-product views, time to selection and the number of cards viewed could all provide useful signals.

But fewer views wouldn’t automatically mean a better experience. Someone might stop browsing because they found the right card, or because they gave up. Understanding the difference would remain essential.

The most useful outcome would be evidence that customers could reach a choice they felt good about, with an amount of effort that suited their situation.

What this changed in my thinking

This work reinforced how much of my role happens before a solution is defined.

It involves interpreting evidence carefully, questioning the first explanation and helping a team agree on the customer problem worth addressing. It also means making ideas concrete enough that we can learn from them.

I came away thinking more about confidence as part of discovery. Finding relevant products is important, but choosing requires something more: the feeling that this particular card suits this particular person.

A catalogue of 60,000 cards creates an enormous opportunity for that connection. Design helps customers reach it.

That’s the part of this work I find most rewarding: understanding what stands between someone arriving with a person in mind and finding a card that makes them think, that’s the one.